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Friday, 13 June 2014

3. BBC Purposes

The Charter

The Royal Charter is the constitutional basis for the BBC. It sets out the public purposes of the BBC, guarantees its independence, and outlines the duties of the Trust and the Executive Board. The current Charter runs until 31 December 2016. The image to the right is the contents page to the legitimate Royal Charter that the BBC use. As you can see it displays lots of different things, from the terms of the Charter to guidance of how to use the constitution.The BBC TrustThe Trust is separate from the Executive Board which is led by the Director-General. The Executive Board is responsible for the operational delivery of BBC services and the direction of BBC editorial and creative output in line with the framework set by the Trust.

They set the strategic objectives for the BBC.

They have challenged the BBC to:

1) Increase the distinctiveness and quality of output;

2) Improve the value for money provided to licence fee payers

3) Set new standards of openness and transparency and do more to serve all audiences.

The BBC offer lots of purposes for members of the public, this include:

Sustaining Citizenship and civil society. - The BBC provides high-quality news, current affairs and factual programming to engage its viewers, listeners and users in important current and political issues.

Promoting education and learning. - The support of formal education in schools and colleges and informal knowledge and skills building.

Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence. - Encouraging interest, engagement and participation in cultural, creative and sporting activities across the UK.

Representing the UK. - BBC viewers, listeners and users can rely on the BBC to reflect the many communities that exist in the UK.

Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK. - The BBC will build a global understanding of international issues and broaden UK audiences' experience of different cultures.

Delivering to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services. - Assisting UK residents to get the best out of emerging media technologies now and in the future.

The BBC gets their funding from a yearly subscription for everyone that has a television. If people want to view BBC's footage they have to pay the £145.50 fee. This amount goes on all of BBC's platforms, Television, Radio, Online and Other Costs. Once you have paid the fee you are applicable for their whole package. The BBC doesn't get any of their funding from advertising, which is somewhat better because it means that there are no annoying adverts in the middle of your favourite shows. Which is different to almost all other television channels.

Our BBC Visit

We visited the BBC headquarters in London. We were given an in-depth tour around the BBC news room and into their old building. We began learning about the history of the BBC and how many countries they actually broadcast to. They broadcast to a huge 200 different countries, around 300 million households world wide and weekly they broadcast to around 166 million people globally. We went to their older building and learnt about the older ways of broadcasting, the majority was via radio, and one of the most popular feature was the radio plays. We had a go at creating our own radio play and we listened back to it afterwards.